Milwaukee native Mildred Harnack (photographed sledding, above) met her German husband at UW-Madison.
At exactly 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 16, 1943, Mildred Harnack (née Fish), Milwaukee native, UW-Madison alum and former UW-Milwaukee instructor, was beheaded.
Her body was then removed from Gestapo execution grounds in Berlin and hung on a meat hook in adjacent Plötzensee Prison. Turned over to Dr. Hermann Stieve, he dissected her uterus and ovaries to study the effects of stress upon menstruation.
Four years later, the Wisconsin Alumni Association magazine recalled Harnack on campus as “slim, blonde and sparkling with life and health.” She died at 40. The prison chaplain said Harnack appeared 60. Her hair had turned white. She was unable to walk. When Dr. Stieve was done, according to the post-World War II U.S. Occupation newspaper, “the headless torso of Mildred Harnack was recognized by a personal friend” who worked in the lab. Mildred’s niece by marriage took the remains home in a shopping bag.
Mildred met her husband, Arvid, at UW-Madison where the German native was studying economics; they became engaged at Picnic Point. They were married in 1926 and moved to Germany where Arvid lectured at the University of Berlin and studied law.
Visiting U.S. relatives in 1937, Mildred explained her involvement in the resistance. “Some of us have to stay to work from the inside.” With Soviet assistance, the Harnacks created an underground network of more than 600 members. According to The New York Times, it “was led by Arvid, by then an official in the Economics Ministry, and by Lt. Harro Schulze-Boysen, a member of Hermann Goering’s staff.” Cells and secret transmitters were code-named for musical instruments. The Gestapo nicknamed it “Red Orchestra.” The cell was discovered in 1942, and after a four-month trial, 47 members were sent to death.
The Nazis hanged Arvid on Christmas Eve; they used a short rope to ensure slow strangulation.
Mildred Harnack was sentenced to six years in a prison camp. But Adolph Hitler himself changed her sentence to death, making Mildred the only American woman executed by order of Hitler.
You probably never heard of Mildred Harnack. But a group of Madisonians has been working to change that. After several weather-related delays, on Oct. 31 the city of Madison Arts Commission placed an 8 ½-foot high monument in Marshall Park, on the western shore of Lake Mendota. The $15,000 black granite obelisk is designed by John Durbrow, a longtime Manitowoc-area resident and retired professor of architecture at Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology.
Nick Schweitzer, a playwright and adjunct professor of law at UW-Madison, has already been
Joel Waldinger
On Oct. 31, a monument to Harnack was placed in Marshall Park.
working with the University of Giessen, the school in Germany where Mildred Harnack worked on her doctorate, to place its own Mildred Harnack memorial. The two universities have a long history of collaboration.
“The people I was speaking with were very enthusiastic about — first, any memorial — and second, about duplication” of the Madison memorial, says Schweitzer.
The city’s arts commissioner, Karin Wolf, has long championed the idea of a memorial for Mildred. “I’m working to find ways to connect people with this history in a way that’s relevant to them,” says Wolf. “Yes, this is a woman who 75 years ago was executed for her role in fighting fascism. But how does that relate to an 18-year-old here in Madison, Wisconsin, today?”
Wolf notes that Mildred Harnack never set out to be a hero. “She was just trying to do the right thing. Which I feel we’re called to do in every era, and have that kind of moral compass; that you won’t see your neighbor treated that way. You will risk your own safety and your own comfort, because it’s not right.”
Mildred Harnack’s last words before execution, translated from German, were “And I have loved Germany so much.”
Her dissectionist, Dr. Stieve, found that women facing execution ovulate less predictably.
